The invention concerns a contact arrangement for connecting an electrode line to an implantable device. The contact arrangement has an electrical connecting socket with a socket longitudinal axis and at least one opening for the insertion of a plug along the socket longitudinal axis. The contact arrangement also has at least one electrically conductive spring contact element which is arranged and adapted to deflect resiliently elastically outwardly upon insertion of a plug, in that case to be compressed at least in a spring deflection direction extending transversely with respect to the socket longitudinal axis and to provide a spring force acting in opposition to the compression.
Spring contact elements for implantable devices are known from the state of the art. DE 196 09 367 to the present applicants discloses a cardiac pacemaker having a sleeve of a round configuration for receiving an electrode line, having radially inwardly resilient spring contact elements which are distributed uniformly at the periphery of the sleeve. The spring contact elements are of a strip-shaped configuration; they are fixed at one side to the sleeve wall and they face into the space in the sleeve, wherein the free end thereof is of a hemispherically convex configuration and faces with the convex side radially inwardly.
Such spring contact elements suffer from the problem that the contact spring pressure force can only be adjusted with difficulty, in particular, if—as is often usual—the spring element is stamped out of the sleeve wall and the leaf spring obtained in that way is bent into the interior of the sleeve. Here there is a reliance in terms of the choice of material for making the spring on the sleeve material so that, in such a case, there is always a compromise between demands on a sleeve and the demands on a contact spring for making secure good electrical operative contact with an electrode line.